Intellectual Property: A Useless Term

Commentary::Marketing
Audience::Entry
UUID: 3a061855-fa21-4efc-a0cc-494418698118

I mostly hate the term Intellectual Property (IP), because it is mostly useless. Copyright, patent, trademark, etc., law has little in common, anywhere in the world.  Personal and societal impacts of those laws are similarly disparate, as one would expect.

Now and then, something that seems to absolutely fly in the face of common sense (granting that sense does not seem to be common) is particularly grating. Such was the case with Definitive Guide (TM) to Cyber Threat Intelligence.

There are various regulatory (and attempts to self-regulate, in order to avoid actual regulation, such as PCI) regimes that require a lot of reading related to possible threats. Fine. Been doing it for years, because I regard it as necessary, and so I applaud that. But it is extremely time-consuming: the doc mentioned above is a 74-page PDF, and is only part of today's reading list. The madness that allows a common phrase to be trademarked is annoying as hell.

Still, one of the contexts that I'll be reading this in (and marking it up for future reference) is DevOps, where there might possibly be some insight to be had from Table 1-1. The first table, so I will have to read this entire pile of marketing nonsense, in case there is support for it later in the doc. There might be something relevant to more recent DevOps concepts (and other marketing nonsense that have been about it) as opposed to older security-related divisions (network, infrastructure, and security operations) within an organization, and their contributions at the 'Tactical, Operational and Strategic' levels. Never mind that tactical and operational divisions would seem very artificial.

So, 74 pages that is mostly marketing noise. Some of which is about banks, etc., being clients. I covered that above, writing about regulatory (and avoidance of same) requirements.

That DevOps reference? DevOps is also rife with marketing noise. But much of DevOps does promote ideas related to getting beyond some long-standing (and foolish) IT practices, such as throwing code over the wall. Which makes me far more tolerant of that group.

In the unlikely event that you have some twisted urge to read this doc too, it can be had from https://cryptome.org/2015/09/cti-guide.pdf. I'm not supplying a direct link to these people directly, for two reasons:

1. Zero desire to provide them any Google-juice.
2. I expect that some sort of registration would be required, hence you would be bombarded with email marketing for, roughly, forever.

If you never see another post on fubarnorthwest, it may be because reading

Chapter 7, "Selecting the Right Cyber Threat Intelligence Partner," enumerates criteria for evaluating cyber threat intelligence providers.

caused immediate brain-death.

Sometimes I Just Have to Rant

That is a failure on my part. I've been working on a set of three posts that would likely have been more helpful, that do not involve Intellectual Property, and would point readers toward things that are more useful, such as why I am about to recommend the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.  Sorry about that. Coming soon.